One Laptop Per Robot?

Chris Jang writes, "The
company that manufactures the OLPC plans
on
marketing the technology commercially. This is going to be great for
portable field computers." Unless you've been stranded on a desert
island the last few years, you probably know that
the OLPC
(One Laptop Per Child) is a project to build a $100 laptop
computer, called the XO, for educational use by children. The XO is
based on the AMD Geode CPU, uses LinuxBIOS
firmware and the GNU/Linux OS. When multiple laptops are used, they
form a wireless mesh network. All this makes it
very appealing to robot builders and other hardware experimenters.
Despite lots of demand, the OLPC project doesn't plan to make
XO laptops available in the US (apparently our teachers union and political
administration or not fond of new ideas that might improve the
educational system, so OLPC decided to help countries that
actually wanted to be helped). US hardware hackers will likely
welcome the news of a commercial unit similar to the XO even at $200. Hardware
specifications of the OLPC XO Laptop are available on the OLPC wiki.